RingCentral Briefs on Current and Upcoming UCaaS Features
At Enterprise Connect 2020, Anand Eswaran (President & Chief Operating Officer, RingCentral) outlined RingCentral’s current Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offerings and upcoming features. Key current features include:
- MVP (message, video, phone), and these capabilities are not limited to internal communication and collaboration. A user can message externally with other organizations, enabling cross-organization teams. This includes the ability to send files, assign tasks, and set up calendars.
- Video capabilities that integrate with both Outlook and G Suite. This allows users to switch from phone calls to video meetings within their email applications.
- Other integrations, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. This includes direct routing with Microsoft Teams’ telephony capabilities.
Upcoming features include:
- AI-driven live transcription by the end of 2020.
- A new partnership with Poly to complement RingCentral Rooms hardware (focusing on the X30 and X50 video conferencing models).
Source: SoftwareReviews RingCentral Office Scorecard. Accessed September 10, 2020.
For further information, watch the session The Future of Work Is Anywhere (available online through to December 31, 2020, at Enterprise Connect 2020).
Our Take
A running theme throughout RingCentral’s session was interoperability and integration. Rather than producing a siloed UCaaS offering, RingCentral has instead opted to integrate with a variety of other collaboration tools and hardware providers. This reinforces one the key future trends highlighted in Info-Tech’s Market Trends and Buyer’s Guide for enterprise collaboration tools: interoperability will keep increasing.
End users often have too many tools with overlapping capabilities. This creates confusion and lowers productivity. Key vendors in the unified communications and collaboration space are beginning to respond to this problem. Rather than giving end users a “this or that” choice for tool use (in which the choice could go against the vendor), vendors are preferring to offer a “this and that” choice.
This indicates a maturing market as standards for proper integration solidify. Indeed, some best-of-breed apps have sought to survive the market by integrating with as many suites and apps as possible. Such apps usually become the app of choice for a particular type of communication or collaboration, no matter which platform is being used. It is no surprise, then, that Zoom (a best-of-breed for web conferencing software) is integrating with RingCentral. While RingCentral’s Office offers a broad UCaaS solution, the fact that end users can still use Zoom within that platform makes RingCentral’s Office more appealing.
Furthermore, it is often easy to forget the importance of software integration with hardware, too. A UCaaS solution that offers video and audio conferencing will likely not be chosen by an organization if the solution cannot be paired with the organization’s meeting room equipment. Bridging this gap by partnering with established hardware provider Poly puts RingCentral in good stead to be a leader in the UCaaS marketspace.
Source: SoftwareReviews UCaaSData Quadrant. Accessed September 10, 2020.